A good feminist analysis. Feminists have been warning the revolutionary left about this for generations: you cannot liberate women if you refuse to let them organize on their own terms. For too long, Marxist groups have treated women’s oppression as a secondary issue that will magically disappear after the socialist revolution. By analysing the structural failures of groups like the SWP, the author accurately demonstrates that when an organization subordinates gender to class, it creates a dangerous environment where powerful men are protected and female survivors are silenced for the "greater good" of the party.
Even when a socialist group (e.g. IMG) has good intentions and actively supports women’s rights in the streets, when its core theory still treats the working class as the only true driver of human liberation it fails women. By not allowing them to build independent, autonomous spaces of survival and power, women are forced to make the tea and do secretarial functions for the men who oppress them.
Patriarchy is boosted by capitalism but is not a byproduct of it; it is its own powerful system that operates inside revolutionary movements just as fiercely as it does outside them. If a political group’s core beliefs and actual structure treat women’s autonomy as an ideological threat, it will always fail them when crisis hits.
You're right about the structure and I'd go further on it than you might expect: the IMG's own writers, as long ago as 1973, described exactly this, the sexual division of labour reproduced inside the party, women's work parked with women, and they called it, borrowing from Lenin, feminism turned upside down. So that charge lands, and it lands from inside the tradition, not just from outside it. But I'd resist the step from there to patriarchy as its own system rather than an element of class societies. You don't need a separate system to explain Delta. You need a single system and one specific mistake: a theory that makes the 'working class', organised in the labour movement, the sole agent of liberation, and therefore treats the oppressed organising on their own terms as a deviation. That mistake produces a structure with no standing outside the leadership, which is fatal whenever the leadership is the accused. The autonomy the SWP refused could have kept it from errors, and refusing it was a structural error, not proof of a second engine turning alongside capital. Where I think the dual-systems account actually costs us: if patriarchy is its own system, the fight against it can be posed as running alongside the class struggle rather than through it, and that is the opening every 'sort out class first' economist has ever wanted. The stronger ground is that women's oppression is rooted in class society and not reducible to it, both at once, which is why autonomous organisation is not a threat to the class project but a condition of it.
Patriarchy and women’s oppression have existed long before capitalism, though such thrive under capitalism. While it is true that capitalism absorbed patriarchy and made it central to its own survival, using the private family to handle social reproduction for free, patriarchy has proved it can thrive under feudalism, ancient empires, and even socialist organisations. Can a single-system theory ever fully account for a power dynamic that predates capital itself?
Absolutely: women's oppression has the same root as exploitation: class society. Humanity's turn to agriculture produced a dramatic shift in community wealth and created extensive, defensible, inheritable, social surpluses which could be captured for the benefit of a social elite. That defining relationship between the owners of the means of production and those who create the wealth across class societies is the foundation of patriarchy. Each form of class society remakes patriarchy in its own image. I found this really useful: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/774-feminism-for-the-99
"Feminism shouldn't start – or stop – with seeing women represented at the top of society. It must start with those at the bottom, and fight for the world they deserve. And that means targeting capitalism. Feminism must be anti-capitalist, eco-socialist and anti-racist. This is a manifesto for the 99%." How can I resist. Thanks for the link.
A good feminist analysis. Feminists have been warning the revolutionary left about this for generations: you cannot liberate women if you refuse to let them organize on their own terms. For too long, Marxist groups have treated women’s oppression as a secondary issue that will magically disappear after the socialist revolution. By analysing the structural failures of groups like the SWP, the author accurately demonstrates that when an organization subordinates gender to class, it creates a dangerous environment where powerful men are protected and female survivors are silenced for the "greater good" of the party.
Even when a socialist group (e.g. IMG) has good intentions and actively supports women’s rights in the streets, when its core theory still treats the working class as the only true driver of human liberation it fails women. By not allowing them to build independent, autonomous spaces of survival and power, women are forced to make the tea and do secretarial functions for the men who oppress them.
Patriarchy is boosted by capitalism but is not a byproduct of it; it is its own powerful system that operates inside revolutionary movements just as fiercely as it does outside them. If a political group’s core beliefs and actual structure treat women’s autonomy as an ideological threat, it will always fail them when crisis hits.
You're right about the structure and I'd go further on it than you might expect: the IMG's own writers, as long ago as 1973, described exactly this, the sexual division of labour reproduced inside the party, women's work parked with women, and they called it, borrowing from Lenin, feminism turned upside down. So that charge lands, and it lands from inside the tradition, not just from outside it. But I'd resist the step from there to patriarchy as its own system rather than an element of class societies. You don't need a separate system to explain Delta. You need a single system and one specific mistake: a theory that makes the 'working class', organised in the labour movement, the sole agent of liberation, and therefore treats the oppressed organising on their own terms as a deviation. That mistake produces a structure with no standing outside the leadership, which is fatal whenever the leadership is the accused. The autonomy the SWP refused could have kept it from errors, and refusing it was a structural error, not proof of a second engine turning alongside capital. Where I think the dual-systems account actually costs us: if patriarchy is its own system, the fight against it can be posed as running alongside the class struggle rather than through it, and that is the opening every 'sort out class first' economist has ever wanted. The stronger ground is that women's oppression is rooted in class society and not reducible to it, both at once, which is why autonomous organisation is not a threat to the class project but a condition of it.
Patriarchy and women’s oppression have existed long before capitalism, though such thrive under capitalism. While it is true that capitalism absorbed patriarchy and made it central to its own survival, using the private family to handle social reproduction for free, patriarchy has proved it can thrive under feudalism, ancient empires, and even socialist organisations. Can a single-system theory ever fully account for a power dynamic that predates capital itself?
Absolutely: women's oppression has the same root as exploitation: class society. Humanity's turn to agriculture produced a dramatic shift in community wealth and created extensive, defensible, inheritable, social surpluses which could be captured for the benefit of a social elite. That defining relationship between the owners of the means of production and those who create the wealth across class societies is the foundation of patriarchy. Each form of class society remakes patriarchy in its own image. I found this really useful: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/774-feminism-for-the-99
"Feminism shouldn't start – or stop – with seeing women represented at the top of society. It must start with those at the bottom, and fight for the world they deserve. And that means targeting capitalism. Feminism must be anti-capitalist, eco-socialist and anti-racist. This is a manifesto for the 99%." How can I resist. Thanks for the link.